Category: tech

Filtering Tables in Joins in MySQL
03 December 2007
I had a situation recently where I was outer joining one table onto another. I needed all rows from the first table, plus any matching rows from the second table. So:
```
SELECT *
FROM table1 t1
LEFT JOIN table2 t2 ON (t1.col_a = t2.col_a)
```
So far, so good, right? In …
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BarCampLeeds Recap
18 November 2007

I did it! I went and spoke at BarCampLeeds, there's flickr evidence to prove it as well :)

My talk was "Source Control Saves Lives", a primer on what source control and why you should use it, with a definite subversion twist because that's what I know the most about and …
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Thinking of BarCamp Leeds
15 November 2007

Recently I found out about a phenomenon called BarCamp, where a bunch of people, mostly geeks, turn up and run their own un-conference. Every attendee speaks, at least that's the theory, and there are a lot of concurrent sessions - so you just attend what you want to. It looks interesting …
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Mysql show processlist
22 October 2007

A very quick entry today, life seems to be so busy at the moment but I have to write this down before I forget. Today I had a weird situation where mysql was consuming a lot of resources but didn't seem to be actually getting anywhere, as if something was …
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A Very Narrow Howto of Podcasting
30 September 2007

I recently featured in an episode of Zend's PHP Abstract. A few people have asked how I went about preparing and recording the piece so here's a quick overview.

Choosing a Topic

This actually wasn't hard because I wanted to pick something that I have particular knowledge of. As a …
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Simple Rsnapshot Setup
22 September 2007

Rsnapshot is a perl-based backup script manager. It is a journalised backup system – meaning that it copies all your files across to the backup media once – and then the only data it transfers after that is the changes. The backups appear on disk as complete copies – but where two generations …
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Top top Tips
20 September 2007

That is to say, some top tips for the command-line program top. Top is a program to show you the top processes consuming resources on the system. You can then press other keys and the program will respond. For example:

q to quit

z to get a colour output

x …
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Reliably Avoid Subversion Collision - Commit First!
07 September 2007

Subversion is a source control system – an excellent accompaniment to software development especially in a team setting. When working with a number of people, it is likely that at one time or another there will be collisions – for example at the moment a project I am working on has a …
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Setting up MySQL to listen to external ports
05 September 2007

I had some difficulty setting up mysql to listen to external ports on a server – the development web server uses databases on another box. The important setting was in /etc/mysql/my.cnf where I removed the line:

bind-address = 127.0.0.1

You should then be able to connect …
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Twitter, meet Facebook. Facebook, Twitter
21 August 2007

Having recently embraced the social networking revolution, or not, I have recently been getting exasperated by how out-of-date my status gets when I can’t be bothered to update it. And how annoying that there are statuses on both Facebook and Twitter which are both out of date.

I stumbled …
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Wiki Wonder
09 August 2007

I love wikis for workplace documentation. For anyone who doesn’t know, a wiki is a web page with an “edit” button, so you can change the content of it if you have something to add or something is out of date or missing. Wikipedia is the obvious example.

So …
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grep: unknown directories method
03 August 2007

The title of the post is the error message I got when attempting to grep a directory containing a file whose name started with a hyphen ( – ).

What has happened is that grep interprets hypens as switches, as if the idea was to convey options to use. This gave me a …
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